Thursday, December 06, 2007

The real horror…

Horror novels make me laugh. They are programmed to make you squirm, make you flinch, make you gasp – and it is that single-mindedness that I cannot help but find funny. It’s so damned artificial!

I’ve written two horror novels. One was a sci-fi horror. The other was a zombie horror. At present, I am writing a character-based horror novel, which I’ve described as being about “the serial killer you hate to love”. (Sure, it’s about far more than that – but that would be telling!)

I’m only about 16k words into the book, which should end up being about 80k in length. It gives me the skin-crackling creeps. I take these characters and twist them and tweak them and mold them into the most horrid creatures, knowing full well that each one is a reflection of my soul.

My friend, Rob, doesn’t get the concept because it’s hard to relate to a protagonist who is a serial killer. But, that’s just it, it’s not. Serial killers are people we know. They’re the people down the street. They’re our brothers, our ministers, our bosses – they’re us.

And I’d been thinking there’s something wrong with this book for a while but it didn’t quite hit me until Rob said that. I had thought, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to take the concept and turn it on its ear, make it an absurd comedy!”

When I realized how very much we can all relate to a serial killer, I realized just what made the book so absurd. The real world is so much worse! Serial killers are nothing. Think about the people we’re killing with our waste, the planet we’re destroying, the disease we find residing right there in our own hearts! Serial killers? They’re pansies compared to the shit we do.